Something which just occured to me as an interesting idea was what would happen if near the beginning of the universe there were more dimensions and they all curled up sort of in the inflation phase...

<begin unqualified and probably incoherent babble>

I wonder if a collapsing dimension could somehow dump lots of energy into the other dimensions as it were... sort of what happens if you stand on a balloon (that doesn't burst)... you loose a dimension and grow lots in the other two.

If you think of how gravity works if all the dimensions were closed but some smaller than the others - say we have a fourth dimension called w which is the small one

everything would be closer together in the w dimension than in the other ones so the mass would all tend fall towards itself along the w dimension more than teh other 3. when two objects got close to each other they would orbit round each other and fly apart in a random direction - often in the x,y, or z directions - so overall you would be converting potential energy in the w direction and converting it into kinetic energy in the x, y and z directions...

so the w direction would collapse into a small loop and everything would suddenly accelerate in the x,y and z directions... would this appear to us afterwards as inflation?

apart from anything else if it happened really late it would screw up the assumptions about the brightness of a light source as intensity wouldn't go as 1/r^2 any more. I think it would screw up a lot more than this including orbits as there are no stable orbits in more than 3 dimensions, so it would have to have happened before the universe went transparent...

Maybe I should have gone to some of the optional cosmology courses and then I could talk more convincingly or see more of the great big holes in this... ho hummm

Interesting idea, could explain where the extra dimensions in string theory 'go to'.

On an equal tangent: you know what set me off thinking that if you try to unravel space backwards, stuff does not fit, and you have to start thinking how it sort of breaks down from a 'rational' number of dimensions? Our number system, which you could see as a 'representation' of how we count reality, has similar problems. I could show you very simple rules in numbers, that break down as you approach zero, or long before that, near three actually you can say things suddenly work out differently than 'before'. Also think primes. When I was young both 1 and 2 were considered primes, with 1 as a kind of obligatory odd duck, and 2 as the only even prime, making it unique. Nowadays primes start at 3. Easier on the rules... that single simple shift speaks volumes, though. There is something distinctly strange going on at that cusp.

The living are the dead on holiday. -- Maurice de Maeterlinck (1862-1949)

Short answer: if you do statistics, your population cannot be too small. Likewise, for certain phenomena to occur at all, you need a basic framework of particles/forces in place. If you keep taking away stuff, at specific points you see the rules change. Shapes and configurations can be equally important, there appears to a minimum in necessary complexity.

Now what daveshorts is trying to do is similar to what I'm researching: see what happens with the rules in different situations.

To give you a better, but harder to grasp, example of how rules change in different 'areas' in number theory, here's Robin's theorem, which states that below 5041 our neat number system does something totally peculiar:

now interestingly, 5040 is a number already acknowledged by Plato to be very special, and its neighbour 5041 is interesting not only because it's 71*71, but also because it ties in with how many cannonballs you can stack in a minumum space.

This is completely different what goes on above 5041, btw. This is of interest to a lot of people because of its possible implications not only in all kinds of prime number theories etc, but also in cryptography. They want to know if this 'hickup' in number theory has any cousins 'out there' in higher number regions, where their calcs could screw up bigtime, and predictions/theorems like the Goldbach suddenly would no longer hold.

Where it all comes togethere is that the series I gave you and other, more important ones agree and to a certain extent not only confirm, but help to better explain the behaviour of quarks in QCD and how they combine to create mesons.

Those rules are essentially calculations - bookkeeping if you will. Lie groups, su(3) etc and how crystals are built up are all related, simply because similar rules apply.

The living are the dead on holiday. -- Maurice de Maeterlinck (1862-1949)

I still remember that Scientific American article. Was that really 1970? I programmed it in FORTRAN and BASIC, and ran it on timesharing mainframes and S100 bus microcomputers. Damn, that's making me feel old.

Game of Life is different in the sense the rules stay the same no matter what size the population, although you could program that different.

My point is just that the opposites of primes, the Highly Composite Numbers (those with the most divisors) are spitting images in their behaviour and composition compared to how particles are built up under different circumstances (combinatorics again), and there are striking similarities how the 'rules' collapse, or break down depending on where you are...

Especially if you find out that these numbers come with '3' at heart (Niven Harshad numbers), like the number of quarks in particles, and that they propagate in a 24-fold cycle (always), which happens to be the number of possible mesons you can make - the building blocks of all matter.

To put it in a nutshell: with high numbers (read: a lot of particles), things behave differently than if you go towards 1 (a singularity of sorts, too). And the way these series break down is maybe capable of teaching us a trick or two without having to smash atoms, because at heart the same thing happens.

The living are the dead on holiday. -- Maurice de Maeterlinck (1862-1949)

Especially if you find out that these numbers come with '3' at heart (Niven Harshad numbers), like the number of quarks in particles, and that they propagate in a 24-fold cycle (always), which happens to be the number of possible mesons you can make - the building blocks of all matter.

To put it in a nutshell: with high numbers (read: a lot of particles), things behave differently than if you go towards 1 (a singularity of sorts, too). And the way these series break down is maybe capable of teaching us a trick or two without having to smash atoms, because at heart the same thing happens.

So are you saying that numbers & sequences of numbers determine how particles behave? Or that the behaviour of particles somehow determines maths? That sounds very Qaballistic (ancient Judaic teaching is that numbers are the basis of creation & everything has a numeric value. The way these values interact to produce other values is the very key to creation, life & an understanding of God).

No, not determine, as much have parallel behaviour with how particles act. Not as strange as it sounds, because we use all kinds of metaphors be they prisms, pieces of cardboard with holes to see which hole the light goes trough to make stripes, and ultimately the computer as super-abacus that allows you to take simple calculations a lot further, and put them in nice graphs that look more like plants than anything to do with numbers, or anything else.

Quabbalists would probably freak out from using Clifford algebra, where a times b does not equal b times a (i.e. is non-commutative), fractals, Lie groups, shapes that exist only in 4 dimensions, and the sheer domain of numbers that are involved. 858899288969751 is a unique number for instance, but to find out it's the only Carmichael under 10^16 that's 15 modulo 24 really takes a computer, I think, although you can even check that result with your ordinary 32-bit desktop calculator. You won't find any others, though. Pretty strange, that.

So basically, you look for surprises in places where there should be no such surprises and compare the differences with other regions. My 'galaxies' of numbers are no more or less real than the 'real' galaxies which you only can see on film, btw - they're too dim for the naked eye. Most people don't realise they only know those nice swirlies from pictures, and can never find them looking up, even on the clearest of nights. You have to lock a camera into looking at the same spot for a very long time to pick them up.

Never heard anybody complain about that, either

The living are the dead on holiday. -- Maurice de Maeterlinck (1862-1949)

Rob - I'm still don't see the significance of some of the maths you're talking about. When you say that "858899288969751 is a unique number for instance, but to find out it's the only Carmichael under 10^16 that's 15 modulo 24", not being a mathematician, I don't see what's so unusual about that. To my mind, saying that 4 is the only square of a whole number < 3 is just the same.I think I'd better butt out of this post because obviously it's all about esoteric maths & I haven't a hope in hell of understanding it. But thanks for trying

Strangely, as I mentioned in another topic, there are structures withIN that area that by all accounts have to be older than that, by quite a margin: 80 billion years for super-clusters to form as they are now.

Maybe gsmollin would like to take a shot at that one? Can't say I've heard any really good explanations for that yet, and would make the whole original question slightly silly, wouldn't you agree?

The living are the dead on holiday. -- Maurice de Maeterlinck (1862-1949)

I think the reason that there is a limit to how far we can see is that before 12 billion years ago the universe was a plasma so was opaque to light - the light released by all the hydrogen atoms catching electrons at the end of this period forms the microwave background radiation. (greatly red shifted for UV to microwave)

I would have thought that the estimates of the age of super clusters were pretty dodgy as cosmologists are working on very little solid data and don't entirely understand the physics yet.

The entire pattern stretches across a quarter of a diameter of the observable universe, a distance of over seven billion light-years. At the known expansion speeds both current and past that would add up to a 150 billion range figure.

keywords: supercluster, Tully, Fischer, Great Wall

The living are the dead on holiday. -- Maurice de Maeterlinck (1862-1949)

Maybe it is because I am more of a solid state type of person I find the number of layers of calculations that are enevitable in cosmology... worrying. Basically a very small change in the physics, or even in their data would radically change their conclusions.

I don't know anything about this particular example, but data from 5000 galaxies could be rubbish, depending on what the error bars are, how sensitive their model is to the data, how good their model is etc etc.

essentially you may be right or not - I don't trust cosmology enough to get worked up about its results...

These numbers have always been at issue, so this is no news. The first expansion numbers for the universe put its age at less than the earth's. Cosmology is not an exact science. The steady state proponents have been quoting those big numbers for about 50 years to discredit the big bang theory. This problem falls under "details". There are fatter fish to fry. As the more fundamental problems get good answers, the rate of organization of superclusters will fall out. I think the answer will be that the organization of the supercluster is primordial. We are seeing an imprint of a structure that formed in the first instant.

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